Nah, that's Axios house style for their readership of extremely busy/important illiterates.

I was under the impression Axios did that kind of shit even before LLMs, though I admit I haven't refreshed my memory on older Axios articles before this statement.

I think axios has always used this style

The similarity of LLM tone to Axios' house style is more evidence IMO that LLMs have been trained to adopt business/CEO/VC-speak over less "punchy" styles that would be far less annoying (not to mention maybe less identifiable too).

Leaning on overworked metaphors ("load-bearing"), overly-declarative/posturing constructions ("it's not this, it's that"), barefaced sales-y smarm ("you're not wrong!") is the kind of language that takes over the higher up the management inverted-ice-cream-cone you go.

Yeah this makes it unreadable for me, immediately distracted by how stupid it is and lose interest in the article. As someone else noted, it’s people who think they are writing for an “executive” audience that have never been within 100 feet of an executive.